by Will Durant
“I was born to be a courtier,” he tells Suzanne; and when she supposes this “is a difficult art,” he replies, “Not át all. To receive, to take, to ask—behold the secret in three words.”121 And in the soliloquy which Rossini has made to resound throughout the world, he addresses the nobles of Spain (and France) with almost revolutionary scorn: “What have you done for so much good fortune? You gave yourselves the trouble to be born, and nothing more; for the rest you are sufficiently ordinary! While I, lost in the common crowd, have had to use more science and calculation merely to subsist than have gone into governing all Spain these hundred years past.”122 He laughs at soldiers who “kill and get themselves killed for interests quite unknown to them. As for me, I want to know why I am furious.”123 Even the human race gets its comeuppance: “To drink without being thirsty, and to make love at all seasons—this alone distinguishes us from other animals.”124 There were miscellaneous strokes against the sale of public offices, the arbitrary power of ministers, the miscarriages of justice, the condition of prisons, the censorship and persecution of thought. “Provided in my writings I mention neither the authorities nor the state religion, nor politics, nor morals, nor the officials, nor finances, nor the opera, nor … any person of consequence, I may print whatever I like, subject to inspection by two or three censors.”125 A passage which the actors deleted, perhaps as coming too close to their own recreations, accused the male sex as responsible for prostitution: men by their demands create the supply, and by their laws punish the women who meet the demand.126 The plot itself did not merely show the servant cleverer than his master—this was too traditional to offend—but it revealed the noble count as an arrant adulterer.
The Marriage of Figaro was accepted by the Comédie-Française in 1781, but it could not be produced till 1784. When it was read to Louis XVI he bore with tolerant humor the incidental satire, but when he heard the soliloquy, with derision of the nobility and the censorship, he felt that he could not allow these basic institutions to be publicly abused. “This is detestable,” he exclaimed; “it must never be played. To allow its representation would be equivalent to destroying the Bastille. This man laughs at everything that ought to be respected in a government.”127 He forbade the staging of the piece.
Beaumarchais read parts of the play in private homes. Curiosity was aroused. Some courtiers arranged that it be performed before the court; but at the last minute this too was prohibited. At last the King yielded to protests and requests, and agreed to sanction public performances after careful expurgation of the text by censors. The première (April 27, 1784) was an historic event. All Paris seemed bent on attending the first night. Nobles fought with commoners for admission; iron gates were broken down, doors were smashed, three persons were suffocated. Beaumarchais was there, happy in the fracas. The success was so great that the play was performed sixty times running, nearly always to a full house. The receipts were unprecedented. Beaumarchais gave all of his share—41,999 livres—to charity.128
History has thought of The Marriage of Figaro as a harbinger of revolution; Napoleon described it as “the Revolution already in action.”129 Some of its lines entered into the ferment of the time. In the preface later attached to the published play Beaumarchais denied any revolutionary intent, and he quoted from his writings passages in defense of monarchy and aristocracy. He asked not for the destruction of existing institutions but for the removal of abuses attached to them; for equal justice to all classes, for greater freedom of thought and press, for protection of the individual against lettres de cachet and other excesses of monarchical power. Like his idol, Voltaire, he rejected revolution as an invitation to chaos and the mob.
Through all the varied turbulence that enveloped him he continued to study the works of Voltaire. He recognized the similarities, though perhaps not the distance, between himself and the patriarch: the same combination of feverish intellectual activity with canny financial skill, the same scorn of scruples and of moral delicacy, the same courage in fighting injustice and adversity. He resolved to preserve and disseminate the works of Voltaire in a collected and complete edition. He knew that this could not be done in France, where many of Voltaire’s writings were prohibited. He went to Maurepas and told him that Catherine II had proposed to bring out a French edition in St. Petersburg; he argued that this would be a disgrace to France; the minister saw the point, and promised to allow the circulation of a complete edition. Charles-Joseph Pancoucke, a Paris bookseller, had secured the rights to Voltaire’s unpublished manuscripts; Beaumarchais bought these for 160,000 francs. He collected all the published works of Voltaire that he could find. He imported Baskerville type from England, and purchased paper mills in the Vosges. He secured Condorcet as an editor and biographer. He leased an old fort at Kehl, across the Rhine from Strasbourg, installed presses, and, despite a thousand tribulations, brought out two editions, one in seventy volumes octavo, the other in ninety-two volumes duodecimo (1783-90). This was the largest publishing enterprise yet attempted in Europe, not excepting the Encyclopédic. Expecting a ready sale, Beaumarchais printed fifteen thousand sets; he sold only two thousand, partly because of campaigns against the enterprise by the Parlement and the clergy,130 partly because of the political turmoil of 1788-90, and partly because the instability of personal fortunes deterred individuals from buying so expensive a set. Beaumarchais claimed to have lost a million livres in the venture. However, he produced also an edition of Rousseau.
The Revolution which he had helped to prepare proved a misfortune for him. In 1789 he built for himself and his third wife a costly mansion opposite the Bastille; he filled it with fine furniture and art, and surrounded it with two acres of land. The mobs that repeatedly rioted in the area looked askance at such luxury; twice his house was invaded, and Beaumarchais, now deaf and prematurely old, was threatened as an aristocrat. He sent a petition to the Commune of Paris professing his faith in the Revolution; nevertheless he was arrested (August 23, 1792); though soon set free, he lived in daily fear of assassination. Then the wheel of fortune turned, and he was commissioned by the Revolutionary government (1792) to go to Holland and buy guns for the republic. The negotiations failed; and during his absence his property was seized, and his wife and daughter were arrested (July 5, 1794). He rushed back to Paris, secured their release, and was allowed to recover his property. He lived three years more, broken in body but not in spirit, and hailed the rise of Napoleon. He died on May 18, 1799, of an apoplectic stroke, at the age of sixty-seven. Seldom even in French history had a man led so full and varied and adventurous a life.
CHAPTER XXXVII
The Anatomy of Revolution
1774-89
WE HAVE examined the mind of France on the eve of the Revolution—its philosophy, religion, morals, manners, literature, and art. But these were frail flowers growing from an economic ground; we cannot understand them without a knowledge of their roots. Much less can we understand the political convulsion that ended the Old Regime without examining in turn, however briefly, each organ of the French economy, and inquiring how its condition made for the great debacle.
In dealing once more with agriculture, industry, commerce, and finance, we should remember that they are not dismal abstractions but living and sensitive human beings: nobles and peasants organizing the production of food; managers and workers manufacturing goods; inventors and scientists forging new methods and tools; towns throbbing with shops and factories, worried housewives and rebellious mobs; ports and ships alive with merchants, navigators, sailors, and adventurous spirits; bankers risking, gaining, losing money like Necker, life like Lavoisier; and, through all the agitated mass, the flow and pressure of revolutionary ideas and discontent. It is a complex and tremendous picture.
I. THE NOBLES AND THE REVOLUTION
France was 24,670,000 men, women, and children; so Necker reckoned the population in 1784.1 The number had grown from 17,000,000 in 1715 through greater food production, better sanitation, and the absenc
e of foreign invasion and civil war. The nation as a whole experienced a rise of prosperity during the eighteenth century, but most of the new affluence was confined to the middle class.2
All but two millions of the French were rural. Agricultural life was directed by royal intendants, provincial administrators, and parish priests, and by seigneurs—feudal lords—estimated, in 1789 at some 26,000. These and their sons served their country in war in their gallant, old-fashioned way (swords were now more an ornament than a weapon). Only a small minority of the nobles remained at the court; the majority lived on their estates, and claimed to earn their keep by providing agricultural management, police surveillance, courts, schools, hospitals, and charity. Most of these functions, however, had been taken over by agents of the central government, and the peasant proprietors were developing their own institutions for local administration. So the nobility had become a vestigial organ, taking much blood from the social organism, and giving little but military service in return. Even this service aroused a public grievance, for the nobility persuaded Louis XVI (1781) to exclude all but men with four generations of aristocracy behind them from every major office in the army, the navy, and the government.
It was further alleged against the nobles that they left vast areas of their estates uncultivated, while thousands of city dwellers were hungering for bread. True of many parts of France was Arthur Young’s description of the Loire and Cher River sections: “The fields are scenes of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery. Yet all this country [is] highly improvable, if they knew what to do with it.”3 * Not a few of the nobles were themselves poor, some through incompetence, some through misfortune, some through the exhaustion of their soil. Many of these appealed to the King for help, and several received grants from the national purse.
Serfdom, in the sense of a person bound by law to a piece of land, and permanently subject to its owner for dues and services, had largely disappeared from France by 1789; about a million serfs remained, chiefly on monastic properties. When Louis XVI freed the serfs on the royal domain (1779), the Parlement of Franche-Comté (in eastern France) delayed nine months before registering his edict. The Abbey of Luxeuil and the Priory of Fontaine, owning together eleven thousand serfs, and the Abbey of St.-Claude in the present department of the Jura, with twenty thousand serfs, refused to follow the King’s example, despite appeals in which several ecclesiastics joined with Voltaire.5 Gradually these serfs bought their freedom, or gained it by flight; and Louis XVI, in 1779, abolished the owner’s right to pursue fugitive serfs outside his own domain.
Though ninety-five per cent of the peasants were free in 1789, the great majority of these were still subject to one or more feudal dues, varying in degree from region to region. They included a yearly rental (doubled in the eighteenth century), a fee for the right to bequeath goods, and payment for use of the lord’s grist mills, bake ovens, wine presses, and fishponds—on all of which he maintained a monopoly. He reserved the right to hunt his game even into the peasant’s crops. He enclosed more and more of the common ground on which the peasant had formerly grazed his cattle and cut wood. The corvée, in most of France, had been commuted for a money payment, but in Auvergne, Champagne, Artois, and Lorraine the peasant was still required to give the local seigneur three or more days of unpaid labor every year for the maintenance of roads, bridges, and waterways.6 In sum and on the average the surviving feudal dues took ten per cent of the peasant’s produce or income. The ecclesiastical tithe took another eight to ten per cent. Add the taxes paid to the state, the market and sales taxes, and the fees paid to the parish priest for baptism, marriage, and burial, and the peasant was left about half the fruit of his toil.
As the money payments received by the lords were reduced in value by depreciation of the currency, the seigneurs sought to protect their income by increasing the dues, by reviving dues long fallen into disuse, and by enclosing more of the common lands. The collection of dues was usually farmed out to professional agents, who were often heartless in their work. When the peasant questioned the right to certain requisitions he was told that they were listed on the rolls or registers of the manors. If he challenged the authenticity of these rolls the matter was submitted to the manorial court or the provincial parlement, whose judges were controlled by the seigneurs.7 When Boncerf, secretly encouraged by Turgot, published (1776) a brochure, The Disadvantages of the Feudal Rights, recommending the reduction of such rights, he was censured by the Parlement of Paris. Voltaire, aged eighty-two, rose again to battle. “To propose the abolition of feudal rights,” he wrote, “is tantamount to attacking the holdings of the gentlemen of the Parlement themselves, most of whom possess fiefs.... It is a case of the Church, the nobility, and the members of the Parlement … united against the common enemy—i.e., the people.”8
Something could be said for the feudal dues. From the noble’s point of view they were a mortgage freely assumed by the peasant as part of the price at which he bought a parcel of land from its legal owner—who in many cases had bought it in good faith from its previous possessor. Some poor nobles depended upon the dues for their sustenance. The peasant suffered far more from taxes, tithes, and the demands and ravages of war than from feudal dues. Hear the greatest and noblest of French socialists, Jean Jaurés: “If there had been, in the society of eighteenth-century France, no other abuse than the despicable remains of that [feudal] system, there would have been no need of a revolt to heal the sore; a gradual reduction of feudal rights, a liberation of the peasantry, would have accomplished the change peaceably.”9
The most remarkable feature of the French nobility was its acknowledgment of guilt. Not only did many nobles join the philosophes in rejecting the old theology; some, as we have seen, laughed at the outdated prerogatives of their caste.10 A year before the Revolution thirty nobles offered to renounce their pecuniary feudal privileges.11 All the world knows the idealism of the young Lafayette, who not only fought for America, but, on returning to France, vigorously engaged in the struggle for peaceful reform. He denounced slavery, and devoted part of his fortune to freeing the slaves in French Guiana.12 The profession of liberal principles, and the advocacy of reform, became fashionable in a section of the aristocracy, especially among titled ladies like Mesdames de La Marck, de Boufflers, de Brienne, and de Luxembourg. Hundreds of nobles and prelates took an active part in campaigns for equalizing taxes, checking governmental extravagance, organizing charities, ending the corvée.13 Some nobles, like the Duchesse de Bourbon, gave most of their wealth to the poor.14
All this, however, was only a graceful ornament on the visible fact that the French nobility had ceased to earn its keep. Many nobles tried to fulfill their traditional responsibilities, but the contrast between the luxurious idleness of rich seigneurs and the hardships of a populace repeatedly on the verge of famine aroused hostility and scorn. Long ago a great noble himself had passed sentence of death upon his caste. Hear René-Louis de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson, secretary of state (1744-47), writing about 1752:
The race of great lords must be destroyed completely. By great lords I understand those who have dignities, property, tithes, offices, and functions, and who, without deserts and without necessarily being adults, are none the less great, and for this reason often worthless.... I notice that a breed of good hunting dogs is preserved, but once it deteriorates it is done away with.15
It was these lords, rich, proud, and often functionless, who initiated the Revolution. They looked fondly back to the days before Richelieu, when their order was the ruling power in France. When the parlements asserted their right to annul royal edicts, the nobilities of race and sword joined with the nobility of the robe—the hereditary magistrates—in an attempt to subordinate the king. They cheered the parlement orators who raised the cry for liberté; they encouraged the people and the pamphleteers to denounce the absolute power of Louis XVI. We cannot blame them; but by weakening the authority of the monarch they made it possible for the National Assemb
ly of 1789, controlled by the bourgeoisie, to seize the sovereignty in France. The nobles threw the first spadeful of earth that dug their grave.
II. THE PEASANTS AND THE REVOLUTION
On the fifty-five per cent of the French soil owned by the nobility, the clergy, and the king, most of the agricultural work was done by métayers, who received stock, tools, and seed from the owner, and paid him, usually, half the yield. These sharecroppers were so poor generally that Arthur Young pronounced the system “the curse and ruin of the whole country”;16 not so much because the owners were cruel, but because incentives were weak.
The majority of the peasant proprietors who tilled forty-five per cent of the soil were condemned to poverty by the small size of their holdings, which limited the profitable use of machinery. Agricultural technology in France lagged behind that of England. There were schools of agriculture, and model farms, but only a few farmers took advantage of them. Probably sixty per cent of the peasant proprietors owned less than the five hectares (about thirteen acres) needed to support a family, and the men were driven to hire themselves out as laborers on large farms. Wages of farm laborers rose twelve per cent between 1771 and 1789, but in the same period prices rose sixty-five per cent or more.17 While agricultural production rose during the reign of Louis XVI, the hired laborers grew poorer, and formed a rural proletariat which, in periods of slack employment, served as a breeding ground for a multitude of beggars and vagabonds. Chamfort thought it “incontestable that there are in France seven million men who beg alms, and twelve million who are unable to give alms.”18
